Interactive activities that support children's learning

Fully engaging children in their learning can help to motivate them and potentially increase the amount of information they absorb from any given activity. Interactive activities can also help to stimulate children's creative thinking.

Here are just a few interactive resources to help children focus on their work.

Make learning hands-on
Activities that require children to use practical equipment can help bring children's learning to life. As an example, children could use props to act out a scene from their favourite story and develop their literacy skills.

In numeracy, children could share out food items to build up their skills in fractions, while in science they could carry out simple practical experiments to enhance their knowledge of key concepts.

ICT
ICT is not just limited to the use of computers, but can also include a wide variety of other media. Flip-cams are now commonly used in schools for children, enabling children to record and present their ideas in creative ways feed this information back to pupils and teachers via an interactive whiteboard. As an example, children could make a variety of recordings of school activities and use this to create a PowerPoint for a number of subjects. Programmable floor turtles can also be used to support children's learning of co-ordinates and positional vocabulary.

There are also a number of interactive games available on the internet that require children to actively engage with their learning material.

Games
Sports that involve teamwork can help foster children's Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE). Children can also use board games and playground games, such as hopscotch, to work on skills such as counting and repeated addition.

Child-initiated activities
These are regularly used in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and give children the freedom to take control of their own learning in a structured environment, with access to a variety of equipment. At home, parents may want to work to create a number of 'small world' environments such as a shop or doctor's surgery, where children can both play and learn simultaneously.